Friday, April 3, 2020

Some perils of giftedness



Enthralled by your own talent, you fail to try to understand anything that falls outside its scope.  You can listen to yourself all day, every day, and never really be bored.  

You know from an early age that adults think of you as being special, different from your peers.  Even if they discipline you, you know that they prize your ability above everything else about you, and although that can be lonely and confusing, you learn to substitute manipulation for responsibility.  You know that adults will always place you first, before your peers who work harder, who feel genuine remorse for their misdeeds, who are kinder.  Adults will even place you, your needs, your development, before themselves; those closest to you may make every financial and personal sacrifice to help you to fulfill your potential.  For the rare few, those sacrifices are made by parents who are invested far more in their child's happiness than in the reflection that a child's success casts on them.   

Depending on how cloistered or driven your childhood and adolescence are, you might manage to make friends your own age, but it's improbable that you can automatically relate to them or they to you.  You copy each other; you copy their attitudes and emotional responses and they copy your talent or assume the roles of support to or control of the VIP.  It's not that you don't have as many feelings as everyone else; that's a common misperception enjoyed by most of the much-less-gifted world and particularly espoused by bullies.  You don't think about things the way that most people do, which is socially problematic at any age, so you choose adaptation over ostracism with the instinct for self-preservation which can be found in one-celled animals.    

As an adult celebrated by the world, right and wrong are meaningless.  Among other celebrated peers, you resume the place in the pecking order that you are used to from childhood:  special, different, immune.  If you had to do some work to become a celebrated adult, rather than to consider that everyone everywhere has to work to achieve anything, you may think of your success as being no less than what you deserve without taking into account the many advantages that made it possible.  You may even think resentfully of the times when absolutely everyone didn't love you, as if those who criticized you or who didn't instantly recognize your genius were evil people attempting to thwart destiny.  

Deaf and blind since childhood to other people's struggles, you may never lose a childish sense of amusement and satisfaction at witnessing helplessness, pain and even despair that you have caused or in which you have participated.  

Conditioned by a lifetime of singularity, if you are unexpectedly confronted with someone remotely like yourself, you're simultaneously attracted and threatened.  If your chosen peer group is torturing that person, forcing him or her to live anyone's worst nightmare, rather than to have empathy you may become his or her most devoted tormentor, a ringleader.  If the target is female, you'll never run out of excuses for that torture in the world the way it is.